


A.M. Asphyxiate

by Onna



Category: Naruto
Genre: Community: kakasaku, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 03:57:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3514487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onna/pseuds/Onna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kakashi loves mornings in the same way he loves funerals: not at all, but they sure do come one after another, don’t they? (Rated M for language)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A.M. Asphyxiate

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first half of this on my phone in tumblr drafts, so sorry about any misspellings 8) kudos or review me if you enjoy sweaty kakashi gym shorts as much as I do 8)

I never used to run in the mornings.

 

The first night she spends over, nothing is wrong. I wake up breathing in pink mouthfuls of hair. She: snoring loud. I can hear bird chatter in between her snorts. I sleep through anything, including important hokage meetings, first time team meet-ups, even the snore bird soundoff band (debuting now).

 

I run now, in the mornings. I like to sweat. I like to let “the twitch” ooze out of my body, to feel the habit I never knew I had bleed out of me and, return home, sparkling wet with its death.

 

The second night she sleeps over I dream about her in my bed. She’s warm and present like so many others before her, like the brown haired one and the white tall one and the one eyed one, even the one with the bells. Dead has four letters and that’s four people so I hope this means that ugly ghost hooded fuck passes over me in the night but just in case the word is “death” and not dead, I hold her too close to me because that’s one extra letter and one extra person that needs to be taken and please oh god not another one.

 

All of that and I forget I’m dreaming, so the hooded creature just continues to peer down at us and I hold her closer and closer and squeeze her into my chest, hoping skin and muscle and bone don’t aid in identifying human people and “look, see, Mr. Reaper? We’re just one person here, there’s only one person, you can pass by now.”

 

I don’t realize that I’m not dreaming until I hear a voice in my ear. “Please, Kakashi, for fuck’s sake please let go of me you’re hurting m-”

 

She has to heal her bruises in the morning. It’s ever so polite the way she hides it under the guise of “freshening up,” although, I’m sure she’s aware of my presence up against the closed door, my ear inches from the wood catching the hum of chakra rising along her stomach to ease the pain of marks my fingers have left. I know this is my final warning. She is far too proud for this to be a mistake: chakra healing can be done anywhere. She wants me to understand this is the Last Time, that’s why she doesn’t turn the faucet on to mask the humming, and why she lets me warm my ear up against the bathroom door, drinking in sounds of her new nightmare morning routine.

 

Morning number four and I wake up to a fist in my face and crying and she’s saying she’ll Never come here again, that this is the Last time, and never sounds an awful lot like the last nail in the coffin, but I’m so glad they’re just her words and not actual nails driving into wood stealing away her face from me forever. 

 

That’s when I start running. I start running before the birds wake, and the path circles around her apartment so I cut through the forest and weave back, just to avoid hearing her snores.

 

I hated her snores.

 

Two weeks later I'm checking my messages in the mornings (like a good hokage), and I can’t tell if she’s walking past my office (a total of 15 times now) because she has something to say (perhaps regarding my newly regimented early morning routine), or if I have transcended into a being Jiraiya fondly referred to as the paranoid self-proclaimed panjandrum.

 

On her sixteenth pass through the sliver of hallway my door so graciously reveals, she pauses to talk to Sasuke. His hair’s tied up, and she wipes his forehead to laugh at all the dirt that collected there on his walk home from God-knows-where.

 

It goes unnoticed. It goes unnoticed that after his journey, he stops here first, to see her. It goes unnoticed by everyone but me. 

 

I grab a piece of memo pad, yanking it from the others (what kind of satan adhesive allows them to stick so fervently to one another?) and write next to the “title” space: 

 

Are You Doing This To Hurt Me 

 

I fold the paper in half, and interrupt the two outside with a, “Sakura, you’re needed in here. I’ve just received an important message on your behalf.” 

 

She shuts the door quietly, but not before gifting Sasuke with a secret smile as the visual space between them breaks behind wood. She turns towards me reluctantly. 

 

“What.” 

 

In case you've missed it: she has changed the tone of her voice from when talking to dirtyboy dreamboat, to talking to me. 

 

Her arms are folded tight around her chest, and I want to scream at her that without me in between, she can be considered a whole person, and her name returns right back into the shufflebag Death is so eager to pull from. 

 

“There is an important message regarding-” 

 

“You mean that yellow piece of sticky notepad paper?” 

 

I glare at her. 

 

“The one that looks exactly like it came from the stack on your desk? That I saw you write on and fold less than two minutes ago?” 

 

I am too overjoyed to hear she was watching me to be disappointed that I was caught. 

 

“Come over tonight,” I say too quickly. 

 

I know what she _wants_ to say, [because she came in here to talk to me instead of (still waiting by the door, mind you) Fuckchiha out there, knowing full well I’m four bullshits short of an actual urgent message] yet I am unsure as to what will _actually_ come from her mouth. 

 

“No.”

 

_I've changed. I run in the mornings now. I wake up early. The nightmares have stopped. I promise I won't strangle you in my sleep for fear of you being taken away from me. I promise I will stop assuming you're going to die like everyone else._

 

I want to tell her all of this, but I know she won't want to hear it. 

 

So I try something else. "I'll rub your back in that way you like." 

 

She turns and exits my office, but not before saying, "Leave your door unlocked." 

 

:

:

:

 

I'm hanging up the bird feeder when she comes down on our fifth morning together. I'm sweating and the geeky green gym shorts Gai assured me would not only look vibrantly youthful but would also aid in stealth and feel as if "nothing was on" are riding up my crotch. 

 

I wave at her. 

 

"Nice shorts," she says, and I give up on cringing because any spectacular vision she had of who I might be died quite a bit ago. 

 

"I love birds." Her hand cradles an oak-painted feeder, letting it swing from her grasp. "I love the way they sound. They sound like.. I don't know. Waking up? Life?" 

 

I am painfully aware of the bedhead she is sporting around, and not because its vertical position defy several aspects of Newton's theory. I guess I will have to trust that sometime in the future I will get to wake up to a nose full of that flowery scented pink bed-head, although I feel robbed today was not that day.

 

This is the moment the words fall into my head, and no moment since have they left: 

 

I want to be with her forever. 

 

They feel so good to think, so warm and _there_ , completely absent of cynicism and appearing without my consent. Sakura says something else about songbirds, but I don't hear her because my sentence feels so good to finally have a home, even if it's just inside my head. 

 

"They sound dull without your snores to accompany them," I finally say. She hits me hard and laughs, and I realize she thinks I'm joking. 

 

Two months later I tell her I love her, and she thinks that is a joke, too. 

 

Sometimes, when I'm running, the sweat bleeds into my eyes and I can't see in front of me. Minato Sensei used to say in order to trust, you have to trust yourself. And if you can't, trusting others _is_ to trust yourself, so try that first. 

 

On these days, I have to stop to push the sweat from my eyes, but I'm working on it.

 

I'm working on it.


End file.
